Of course I love journalists to bits, and even pretend to be one myself if I can get a magazine or newspaper to stump up cash for a piece of my prose, but there are times when the need to have a hook and a simple strapline for every story drives me crazy.

The trouble is, perhaps unlike a good science magazine, when a newspaper runs a story, it rarely puts the amazing new facts into context. A friend bearded me about this in the pub last night. “Bloody scientists,” he said (or rather milder words to that effect). “One day they are telling us we ought to drink a couple of glasses of red wine a day for our hearts and the next we’re told to reduce alcohol consumption to significantly less than that to reduce cancer risk.
What the writers of these articles rarely seem to bother to explain is that pretty well everything has risks and benefits associated with different levels of consumption, and the ideal should be to get the optimal balance of the two. It’s not enough to show one side of the equation, referring to a single risk or benefit. All that gives us is confused punters.

It’s something anyone writing about climate change is very familiar with. Are you and Al Gore supporter or a Great Global Warming Swindle person? you get asked. Neither, because both miss out the bits that don’t support their story (rather a lot of bits in the latter case).

There’s confusion in the general public about both climate change and the risks and benefits of alcohol consumption – just like in many other areas of science. It’s time the non-specialist media made sure they gave a bit more context when they break one of these stories.